i cannot claim (we are not desolate)
by emergencysalt
Summary: Steve/Bruce/Tony(?). When Tony Stark likes someone, they know it. (That's the problem.) That is not the problem. The problem is definitely Bruce.


When Tony Stark likes someone, they know it. (That's the problem.)

That is not the problem.

The problem is definitely Bruce.

It's not easy being Bruce Banner, although it's not like anyone would have claimed it was. Here he is, the proud two-months' owner of the second-best lab in the best building in New York City, and he still finds himself, halfway to his room, holding an empty plastic bottle Tony was drinking from that morning. It's three a.m. He's been working since eleven, when he decided for the third night running that he might as well put his insomnia to good use. He finally decided he was fatigued enough to try to go back to bed, he'd detoured to the kitchen for some of the tea Tony had inexplicably found out was his favorite, and now here he was, in the hallway. The half-dimmed lights above him run on the cleanest energy in the world. His sheets, when he reaches them, will have a higher thread count than he cares to think about. He just absent-mindedly salvaged a plastic bottle from where it was resting emptily on the counter. Some precautions, he reminds himself _almost_ angrily, are no longer necessary.

He doesn't need that bottle; he knows he doesn't; he pads to his room on bare feet and disposes of it, gently, so it doesn't make a crashing sound when it ricochets off the bottom of the trash bin. Some precautions are unnecessary now. Some aren't.

Bruce will admit he likes the clothes, a mix of Tony's more brightly-colored button-downs, high end earth-toned clothes that he suspects Pepper bought, and a single soft-grey T-shirt with a stylized image of Captain America's shield. That might be Tony's idea of a joke.

Or a clue, Bruce supposes, since he walks into the kitchen for yet another pot of tea and finds Steve Rogers, still in his motorcycle jacket, almost gleaming in the early-morning light. He clears his throat, squinting, and Steve startles and spins around— er— blondly.

"Hi," Bruce says quietly, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose.

"Hello," Steve says. "I just got in. Say, do you know _how_ a microwave heats things?"

Bruce laughs under his breath. Captain America is both surprisingly human and surprisingly easy to think of as Steve.

"What brings you back to us, Captain?" Bruce says over his shoulder as he takes the cup, faintly smelling of chocolate, from Steve's hands and coaxes Tony's microwave into heating it. "Last I heard, you were still traveling across America, getting to know the common man."

"Stark didn't tell you?" Steve says. "He invited me to come stay here. He didn't say you were still here— not that I mind," he stumbled over himself to add. "I just meant—"

"Don't worry about it, Captain," Bruce says. It doesn't even hurt, somehow, not more than anything else does. It probably, Bruce reflects, still sounded more than a little bitter. "I admit I'm not sure why you'd take him up on it. You two weren't getting along so well before." He turns back around, still mildly overcome by the spectacle that was Steve Rogers, glistening with a little unevaporated morning dew, leaning against a kitchen counter.

"I— misjudged him," Steve admits, glancing down. "I feel bad. And Shield gave me an apartment in my old neighborhood, but it's not the same. I thought it might be better to find somewhere totally new, so when he offered…" He shrugs. "Oh, and uh, call me Steve?"

The microwave beeps and Bruce turns to hide his face. He's grinning. It doesn't make sense.

"Here," Bruce says.

"Thanks."

"You can call me Bruce," he says. Steve looks up from nursing his hot chocolate.

"Thanks."

"I'd have pegged you for a coffee man," Bruce says casually.

"I got used to army coffee. No one here makes it strong enough. Cocoa's about the same, though."

"You clearly haven't tried Tony's coffee, then," Bruce says. "I'm pretty sure he's trying to find out how close coffee can get to actually being industrial solvent."

Steve cracks a smile at that, and it's almost a picture-perfect Captain America smile, but the left corner of his mouth quirks up just a bit higher. It's almost a Captain America smile, but better.

It's only when Bruce wanders back to his room and glances, much less blearily than before, into the mirror, that he realizes he wore the T-shirt to bed.


End file.
